My Unsentimental Education

to cover expenses.”
One of her other sons was an alcoholic. Another was a police officer, suspended. Another was a deadbeat dad. Her stepchildren were dentists, architects, businessmen, or married to these and working in professions from the “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up” checklist for girls: Mother, Nurse, Secretary. My mother-in-law had been stranded without child support herself, so she was sympathetic to the ex-wife of the son who was the deadbeat dad. This former daughter-in-law had since married money. Marrying money had been my mother-in-law’s strategy too. Her husband made money but spent a lot, having pulled himself up by his bootstraps to escape a childhood so dire he craved luxury.
Because Chet seemed sad, edgy, I invited him to the appointment where I made my retirement and insurance decisions. I chose the cheapest health insurance, since we were young. I put the minimum into retirement because we had debt. Then Chet said I should pick the best life insurance. This seemed inconsistent. We were young, as we’d agreed.
I said so. Chet looked testy. The human resources aide had already said how unusual it was for the employee’s spouse to come, but nice, she added, that he was taking such an interest. Now she gave us a quizzical look. I signed on, reasoning that, if I were a man and Chet a woman, good life insurance would be the responsible choice. We drove home. Chet looked around, glum, and said he’d never have moved here if not for me.
I might have used multiple job offers to get a better salary, but I’d been flummoxed to have offers at all; I’d worried about jinxing them. And now my name had been released to a mailing list. Or it was a new era in banking. Credit card offers arrived. I threw them away, but Chet needed credit to start a business, he insisted. I wasn’t afraid of him. Or maybe I was afraid for ten minutes here or there, and then I’d leave until he calmed down.
Or it’s easy to say so now. But in Utah I could have moved out if I’d taken time off from classes—forgoing my stipend, explaining my predicament to the director of the program, staying in someone’s guest room, and bargaining with my landlord. Yet I didn’t because I had my work that, if I executed it well and on time, might one day be remunerative, and my love life had nothing to do with that. So I’d had work, and Chet had me. In Utah, I wasn’t exactly remunerative for Chet, but I’d been pleasant enough, or at least he’d liked the way I tamed life: curtains, nagging reminders to tidy up and pay bills.
I didn’t want him to hit me, of course, so he got his way when I didn’t have the patience to argue, leave the house, then start the argument over again. Or the time. I’d come home from teaching—papers to grade, books waiting on my desk—and he’d want to talk. Impatient, I’d lose my temper. I shouldn’t have raised my voice. He shouldn’t have raised his hand. Most of the time he stopped himself, but not always. By today’s standards, using one-size-fits-all diagnostics, he was abusive. But I never thought his anger was my fault. I never felt helpless, or not for long. I had routes out, more than he did. I was outmatched physically. He was outmatched verbally. Years later, he’d be diagnosed with panic disorder so crippling he’d no longer be able to self-alleviate with tantrums.
But I didn’t know that then. Our arguments escalated. Unseemly.
I was the youngest professor in the department—the Doogie Howser professor, a student said. The director of graduate studies lived across the street, the dean three doors down.
Seemly mattered.
One night Chet and I were shouting about credit cards, windows raised for fall breezes, and the phone rang. It was Sally, a next-door neighbor who was more like me than anyone else on the street because, though Sally and her husband owned their small house, her husband worked two blue-collar jobs. She was pregnant a third time, a nice surprise, she’d said, yet her husband looked weary and dismal when I saw him: coming, going.
I answered the phone and Sally said: “Are you all right?” I was, I said. She asked again, same phrase, mounting intensity, a little thrill of excitement, a new lease on life, a hobby: me. I mean she sounded happy to be on the phone. I wasn’t. I wanted to shut the windows, get back to grading, and I didn’t want to discuss the credit card argument with Sally.
Perhaps she saw me as a twin-friend because her husband worked eighteen hours a day and was tetchy when he came home, upset about how she spent money, she told me. She started inviting me over in what she saw as my free time. But I’d be grading. Writing. I wouldn’t get tenure if I didn’t publish another book—though this hadn’t been true for the low-paying job in Washington, I thought wistfully, remembering those fun professors, but of course we’d be busy if we were colleagues, no time for whiskey and haggis.
One afternoon I came home from watching Sally’s children while she went to the ob-gyn, and Chet was pressing dress slacks for dinner at the country club. He’d grown up doing odd jobs at a country club in Houston, so he helped me look through my closet to choose what to wear. In Spooner, we had just a golf club—people who paid annual greens fees—but anyone could drink at the golf club bar. I’d also had no time to sew and hadn’t yet adjusted myself for North Carolina, adventitious protective coloration, which was bright, neon, I realized in the country club dining room where I felt out of place in my gray dress with matching cardigan. I met the landlord’s wife, in her lime-green shell and skort, and the couple joining us, a stockbroker and his wife, in her orange, lock-knit